Robert Cravotta

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Robust Design: Patch-It Principle

The software patch is a much maligned technique for keeping systems robust because many users perceive that the majority of these patches as merely fixes of feature bugs that the developers should have taken care of before shipping the software. While there are many examples where this sentiment has a strong ring of truth to it, the patch-it principle is a critical approach to maintaining... More

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Extreme Processing Thresholds: Low Power On-Chip Resources

In the previous post in this series I pointed out that the “sweet spot” clock rate for active power consumption for some microcontrollers is lower than the maximum operating clock rate for that part. However, looking only at the rated power consumption of these microcontrollers at a steady always-on operating state ignores the fact that many low-power microcontrollers employ... More

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Question of the Week: Do you use formal selection criteria when choosing software languages and programming tools?

Apple’s recent change to section 3.3.1 of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement for the 4.0 SDK explicitly limits developers to using “…Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs application” While this... More

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Robust Design: Sandbox Principle - Playing Nicely

I originally planned this post to be about the “Patch-It” principle of robust design. But, I am accelerating the “play nicely” sandbox principle to this post to use the change in Apple’s iPhone Developer Program License Agreement for the iPhone OS 4 SDK, section 3.3.1 as a timely example of an approach of how to get third party software to play nicely... More

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Extreme Processing Thresholds: Low Power #2

In the previous post in this series I asked whether reporting uA/MHz is an appropriate way to characterize the energy profile of a processor. In this post, I assume uA/Mhz is appropriate for you and offer some suggestions of additional information you might want processor vendors to include with this benchmark when they use it. I will explore how uA/MHz is insufficient for many comparisons... More